Scientists have admitted the conception of a child from three parents unsafe

. The recently proven technique of conception from three parents to get rid of rare hereditary diseases, found to be unsafe for the child because of errors in the “transplantation” of mitochondrial, say scientists in an article published in the journal Nature.

“Our research indicates that we can achieve a very high efficiency in creating embryos free of mitochondrial mutations, if we learn to find the right donor, the right combination of haplotypes of mitochondria in their transplant,” said Shukrat Mitalipov from the University of science and medicine Oregon in Portland (United States).

Our cells contain a lot of separate structures called mitochondria, which play a very important role in their lives – they “convert” the nutrients in molecules of ATP, the universal cellular energoalmaty. Problems in the mitochondria scientists now associated with the development of old age and decrepitude of the body.

Mitochondria are unique because they have their own DNA, which contains instructions for their Assembly and operation. Violations in its work, in combination with mutations in “normal” DNA, lead to the failure of the “conveyor” of the Assembly of ATP, which the cells start to starve and die. Carriers of defective mitochondria usually die at an early age.

Seven years ago, Mitalipov and his colleagues have found a solution to this problem – they have developed a special method of “transplantation” of DNA that was allowed to take a fertilized egg with mutant mitochondria, the “tear out” of the nuclear DNA and transplanted it into the empty egg cell from a normal cell power plants.

In 2009, Mitalipov and his colleagues have shown almost 100% efficiency of this technique in experiments on monkeys, and in September of this year, Chinese scholars working in Mexico, confessed that he illegally carried out a successful operation on a human fetus.

In October on two similar successes, said Ukrainian doctors, who reported at the conference in new York that two women expecting children from three parents. All this pointed to the safety of the use of technology.

Mitalipov and his colleagues found that this procedure does not always lead to the desired result, conducting experiments on donor oocytes containing a single mutation.

As it turned out, when these operations are approximately 2% of the mitochondria from maternal cells,into a new egg for the transplant. In some cases, paradoxically, this leads to the fact that normal mitochondria somehow disappear as the division of egg cells and replaced with copies of the “mutant” parent power plants.

According to Mitalipova, this occurs for the reason that mitochondrial DNA contains a special segment that controls the speed of division and multiplication of mitochondria. It is possible that he was more active in the mutant mitochondria, but while scientists can’t exactly say what causes this “revenge”.

It is possible that observation of the reproduction of mitochondria will give an answer to this question, but such experiments cannot be conducted on human embryos in most developed countries. Therefore, the practical application of such transplantation of mitochondria worth the wait, the scientists conclude.